Ambassador 5-book set: Ambassador: Science Fiction Thriller Series

Summary

The 5-book set of the Ambassador series.

1: Seeing Red - Cory Wilson is about to start his new job as representative to gamra, the alien network that controls the network for wormhole travel, when a political murder may well end his position before it started.

1A: The Sahara Conspiracy - Cory is asked to deal with the alien mafia on Earth, and stumbles across a dangerous plot.

2: Raising Hell - the wormhole network goes down, and Cory's friend and leader of the largest populated world Asto is caught off-world. Dangerous politics are afoot on Asto, and Cory decides to help his friend.

3: Changing Fate - The outage of the wormhole network was caused by an artifial source: a giant ship that was last seen in the inhabited worlds over 50,000 years ago. Is it live? If so, who is on board? Cory and his team investigate.

4: Coming Home - By isolating the captain from his ancient ship, Cory hopes to avert hostile action. The captain has other ideas.

Ambassador 5-book set - Patty Jansen

Ambassador

Patty Jansen

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Ambassador 1

Seeing Red

Chapter One

DIPLOMATS AT Nations of Earth often joked that when politics sank into a lull, something was about to explode. The greater the sense of we’ve-got-it-all-sorted-out smugness, the bigger the bang.

I was certainly far too comfortable, if jet-lagged and keen to get to my hotel, when I met President Sirkonen in his office in Rotterdam that afternoon. Nice and easy. I had received my commission from gamra with all the final details such as what time I needed to be at the Exchange. And tickets, by themselves worth more than my annual Earthly salary. Now I only needed the president’s signature, and I would be off to my new job. Definitely too comfortable.

I had never been on first-name terms with the president, but while I sat there trying hard not to succumb to jet-lag, he chatted about my father, whom I had just visited, and who had finally retired from Lunar Base to his native New Zealand. Sirkonen opened the drawer of his desk and took something out, which he flipped across the gleaming wooden surface. I could do nothing but catch it. A datastick. I turned it over. The black plastic cover reflected the sunlight.

What’s on it?

You might find it useful. Think of it as some . . . personal advice, from me to you. We’ll talk about it later, when you return for your first briefing. He shut the drawer with a thud as if closing the subject.

This was highly irregular. Mr President, can I ask—

He shook his head, and offered me a drink—Finnish vodka, best in the world, he said. While he poured, his hands trembled.

I should have insisted that he tell me what was wrong, but who was I? An unimportant, sending-out-our-feelers type of diplomat, expendable and twenty years his junior. Not the type of person to draw attention to his problems—with alcohol or otherwise.

We made a toast. The heavy scent of the vodka did nothing to improve my alertness.

Mr Wilson, when you come back in six month’s time, you must present your report to the general assembly. We need to know in detail what sort of regimes we’re dealing with.

I didn’t understand why he spoke in such empty generalities; I wondered when he was going to open that folder on his desk and sign the contract. Nicha, my Coldi assistant, was waiting in the foyer. We had a whole heap of work to catch up on. I was annoyed that Sirkonen had changed our meeting time at the last minute—the original meeting had been scheduled for tomorrow morning.

Sirkonen stopped speaking.

I stared at him, realising with embarrassment that I’d been off with the fairies. Was I meant to have said something? Was I breaking rule number one of the diplomatic circle: never show any sign of sleep deprivation?

An attack of dizziness overtook me. My vision wavered, as if the world were painted on a silk flag that flapped in the wind, and all the furniture was rimmed in a red aura. Mr President, I’m—

I just managed to put my vodka down. The glass hit the wood with a soft clunk, the only sound in the frozen silence.

There was a small sound from outside, a click.

As if stung, Sirkonen turned to the window; his eyes widened.

Sir?

The president opened his mouth, but a sharp crack interrupted his words.

I didn’t think. I dived off the chair into the hollow of safety under the desk. The room exploded. Glass shattered, wood splintered. Something crashed on top of me.

There was no reply, not even when I commanded the link to open completely. Yet Nicha had been waiting in the foyer. Well within the feeder’s range.

I lifted a hand to the back of my head. My fingertips met my scalp, spreading slick wetness in my hair. Blood—I could smell it.

Of course, I’d handed my feeder in before I came into the President’s office.

The president’s office . . . an explosion. Bloody hell.

Sir? A male voice, much closer.

The pressure on my back eased.

And then, Help me get this off.

The pressure lifted. I rolled onto my side, blinking against light that angled into the room from an unusual source. A large hole gaped in the wall where the window had been, the edges like jagged teeth of bricks and mortar. Through it, dusk-tinged clouds looked obscenely peaceful.

The room itself was a mess of glass, plaster and splintered wood.

A woman knelt by my side, in the uniform of the Nations of Earth forces, but with a red collar that said Special Operations. Are you all right, sir?

My head pounded. Blood dripped from a cutting board of slashes across my palms.

Shards of thick glass littered the carpet, the same shatterproof security glass which was used in spacefaring vessels. Supposedly unbreakable.

There were also fragments of the vodka glass, wet stains of the vodka itself, mixed with plaster from the ceiling, paper, and books—those priceless four-hundred-year-old volumes that had filled the shelves in the president’s office. And amongst all that mess copper-dark smears of blood—mine, I presumed.

The voice that drifted from the other side of the wrecked desk was weak, but unmistakably Sirkonen’s. No, no, you don’t have to . . . I can . . .

I don’t think so, Mr President. You’re injured.

The President was alive. I was alive. No idea what the hell had just happened, other than that I was simply alive, and glad of it.

The guard helped me to my feet and sat me down on the president’s sofa, my palms dripping blood on four-hundred-year-old furniture.

I managed a weak, My hands. Looking at them made me feel sick; everything made me feel sick.

We’ll get another ambulance out in a minute.

But . . . I didn’t want an ambulance. I—

Panicked voices. He’s losing consciousness!

People ran across the room. Two paramedics in orange overalls wheeled in a stretcher.

Someone flung a towel in my lap, which I wound around my bleeding hands as best as I could. The embroidered Nations of Earth symbol ended up on the outside.

Emergency crew lifted President Sirkonen onto the stretcher, his shirt ripped and wet with blood. They covered him with a silver blanket and put a mask over his face. The president tried to wave it away, his movement feeble. His Scandinavian tanned skin had gone very pale.

Keep still, Mr President. We’ll have you in the hospital very soon.

Then they were out the door.

A different guard, male, sat down next to me. You’re Mr Cory Wilson, Union delegate?

I nodded. Normally I would have corrected him—gamra, not Union—but that seemed a trivial, pedantic issue right now. I might work for gamra, the organisation that governed the Exchange, the means of interstellar travel, but right now, I faced him as a fellow human, and without the input from my feeder I felt this even more keenly. Our president had been attacked, and my job . . . was another world, literally.

I’m sorry, sir. I need to ask some questions. Did you see anything?

No, just the window exploded. A feeling niggled in the back of my head. I couldn’t see outside. There was a curtain. It now lay mangled on the floor. Then I remembered. Sirkonen saw something. Just before it hit.

Was it even an explosion? There’d been no fire. Just wavering air, and a red aura surrounding everything. No, that was probably because I was exhausted, my brain still operating on New Zealand time.

I rubbed my face with the top of my wrist. Where is Nicha?

A puzzled look crossed the man’s face.

"My zhayma. He was waiting in the foyer."

The frown deepened. Um, sir, are you speaking Isla?

I was, wasn’t I? Eight years of full-time training in Coldi, and I was no longer sure. The wrong language had the habit of slipping out when I was off-guard and tired.

Someone else behind my back said, There was a person in the foyer, sir. I couldn’t be sure about the gender.

Union? the other guard asked. I had the feeling he would have liked to have used the derogatory word ethie, from Extraterrestrial Humanoid.

Yes.

I said, He’s my assistant. I need him here.

A small silence, and then, I’ll go and see, sir.

Thank you. I leaned back on the couch.

I hadn’t liked that silence, not at all. Nicha was all right, wasn’t he? If not, I needed to get him to the Exchange immediately. Coldi bodies differed from ours in much more than their hair with iridescent highlights, purple, blue and green like a peacock, or their muscular build. While they could vary their body temperature, they reacted badly to hypothermia, meaning anything below forty Celsius. I imagined an emergency crew working on Nicha, giving him the wrong blood, not keeping him warm enough. The thought made me shiver. I had lived with Nicha for four years, spent most of my waking and sleeping hours with him as part of the zhayma concept. In the rigid hierarchical Coldi society, he was my equal, my companion, the other half of my job, my pillar, my hand that reached out to the many peoples of gamra. He was the reason they would talk to me openly; he was my translator for those languages and customs I’d had no opportunity to learn. An interviewing journalist had asked me what a zhayma was, and I’d explained it was like being married, but without the sex; but it was more. For Coldi people, it was pathological; they did everything in pairs of two.

Why had I been so stupid as to leave Nicha in the foyer or hand in my feeder?

President’s orders. Simple as that.

Uniformed personnel with guns crouched over the debris near the window. Red collars on their shirts betrayed that they all worked for Special Services and they, I remembered, were the spying division of the armed forces. Two of them sat on their knees, waving scanning chips over the debris. Damn expensive equipment that was, nanotechnology from the glory time before the wars. Way too expensive to produce these days.

Snatches of conversation drifted across the room.

. . . like a bomb being thrown into the window.

. . . sure? He says Sirkonen saw something.

. . . have to get that on record . . .

Where was Nicha?

I struggled to the edge of the couch. Tested my legs, and then rose carefully to tap one of the uniformed men on the back. The man turned. Sit down please, sir. He, too, wore the emblem of the Special Services Branch.

Another said, Ambulance is on its way.

I’m sorry, I . . . I need to speak to my . . . assistant. I was more careful with language this time. Coldi words upset too many people. He’s in the foyer.

I know. He’s being interrogated.

Interrogated? I need to speak to him.

Not yet, sir.

You shouldn’t interrogate him until I speak to him.

There was a flicker of hesitation on his face. Maybe he heard the anger I tried to keep from my voice.

Sir, there has just been an attack on the President. We need to—

"I understand, but Nicha Palayi falls exclusively under gamra law. If you wish to interrogate him, you can apply to your local gamra delegate, which happens to be me. Now I will grant that permission, because I understand that you need to speak to all possible witnesses, and I have no desire to withhold information. However, I want to see him first. I would also appreciate it if my feeder could be returned and my security staff were brought up here. They are at the security post downstairs."

Goodness knew what those two young men had been subjected to, how bewildered and lost they must feel. They spoke some Isla, but with poor fluency.

The man snapped into a military salute. Sir. He turned on his heel and marched out of the room, no doubt to get a higher-ranked officer.

He didn’t return.

Two guards asked to search me. In my pocket, they found the datastick the president had given me. One guard turned it over; the black plastic surface reflected the light. What’s on it?

I don’t know. I wished to hell I knew.

I’ll need to make a copy.

I’d rather you didn’t.

The investigating team will need to study every object present in this room.

"It’s most likely information pertaining to my job. I’ve had no opportunity to look at it. It might contain material sensitive to gamra interests."

He raised his eyebrows, like he wanted to say The president has been attacked, isn’t that more important than extraterrestrials?

I assure you, sir, all material we collect is confidential.

I nodded, by no means assured, but what could I do? Refuse and be treated as suspicious?

He took the datastick to a colleague at the door. Shit. Sirkonen had given this thing to me. Not to be pried at by Special Services.

He had been talking about Seymour Kershaw, my predecessor of sorts, who had disappeared at gamra headquarters in Barresh ten years ago. Now some idiot had made the story into a movie which accused the Coldi, the dominant ethnicity within those sections of the galaxy serviced by gamra, of killing him. I hoped the information wasn’t about Kershaw. The connection between it and the fictional allegations in the movie would be all too easy to make.

I could hear the questions from the press. Why didn’t these aliens allow Earth investigators to see for themselves what had happened to their ambassador? Why did they keep such tight control on their precious Exchange—so that smart humans couldn’t travel to other worlds and infect them with undesirable ideas, like democracy and religion?

And I could explain as much as I wanted: because gamra is familiar with the consequences of allowing different species to pursue their jurisdiction across interstellar space. It rarely ends well. Because you cannot translate law from one species to the other. And no one on Earth would listen to me.

Eight years of working with gamra, and I thought I was beginning to understand. Yet the main thing I understood was that these people might be our biological cousins on the human family tree, separated by fifty thousand years, or more, of isolation, but their physiology and mental hardwiring differed so much from ours that Earth hadn’t even begun to understand.

I believed we desperately needed to set the incident aside and move on, because that’s what gamra did, drowning conflicts in bureaucracy, because it was the only way to keep the Exchange network functioning in peace.

I got the datastick back, and managed to work it into my pocket with the bloodied towel. Shit.

Sirens wailed outside, but the promised ambulance didn’t come, or if it did, was diverted elsewhere. Military hovercraft zoomed backwards and forwards across the part of the sky visible through the hole in the wall.

I was sore.

I was tired, barely having slept since my father had driven me to the airport in Auckland thirty-six hours ago.

I was hungry.

I still clutched the filthy towel around my hands.

I caught the attention of a young Special Services officer. I thought it was the one I had asked about Nicha before, but all faces blurred in my mind.

Look, I’ve been sitting here long enough. I asked to see my assistant. Where is he?

What the hell was going on here? I expected this kind of obtuse pass-the-buck-ery at gamra. They were good at that. I had not expected this kind of treatment here, in Rotterdam, at Nations of Earth.

Oh, blow their restrictions.

I wriggled one hand out of the towel. Pieces of glass glistened in deep cuts, which still oozed blood.

I smeared it on my jacket as I fished in the pocket for my comm unit. Ouch, ouch and ouch. Contrary to security regulations inside the President’s office, I turned the unit on.

It beeped.

Not Nicha. The ID told me that much.

Eva?

Cory, there’s been an attack on the President. The female voice with the Polish accent brought a wave of longing, of safety, of roast dinners with glasses of wine, and the distinctive smell of nicotine-free tobacco from her father’s pipe.

I know, I’m in his office.

His—But you weren’t meant to see him until tomorrow!

There was a change of plan.

Oh Cory! She burst into tears.

Eva, please. I forced my voice into the calmest tone I could muster. I’m fine, tell your parents, but right now, I need to call—

The connection went dead.

A uniformed figure stood before me, flipping shut an electronic device. Sorry sir, no communication from this office. He, too, belonged to Special Services.

"I want to talk to my assistant. Can you return my feeder? It’s in a basket on the secretary’s desk. I’ve been sitting here for a long time. Gamra will be asking questions about me." And if you don’t let me go now, I’ll give you more shit than you’ve ever seen in your life.

I’ll go and see, sir.

He also vanished out the door that yawned like a portal to freedom.

Then a different man in uniform came in. Mr Wilson, come with me please.

Are you taking me to my assistant?

Follow me, please.

Where are we going?

Out.

Stupid question, Mr Wilson. Out was a definite improvement on wait here, so I stumbled to my feet, intending to give him an earful as soon as I faced a part of him that wasn’t his uniformed back. Waiting in the foyer was a female ambulance officer with a first aid kit. Hers was the first smile that greeted me for hours. The anger seeped away.

Are you in much pain, sir?

Not too bad. The pain had subsided into a dull throbbing, but the muscles in my hands were getting stiff. I was shivering, in need of infusion to counter the effects of my adaptation treatment. That medication and equipment was in my hotel room.

I glanced into the hall through the open doors, but saw no sign of Nicha, my guards or my feeder.

She made me sit in the secretary’s chair and took the towel off my hands.

One look. A grimace of her lips. This will have to be treated, I’m afraid.

I need to find my assistant. Nicha had to be going crazy without me.

Her face turned serious. You need surgery to remove all the glass from your hands, sir.

But my assistant . . . And my feeder, and my guards . . . I glanced at my bloodied palms, repressing a shivering surge of nausea. She was right.

I think she saw that realisation in my face. Her tone softened. Come, sir. I’m sure your assistant is in safe hands. You should worry about yourself now. You’re injured and in shock.

She clipped her case shut and helped me up.

The hall and the stairways crawled with servicemen, Nations of Earth, Special Services, National Guard and ordinary police, all of them bristling with guns. The two-storey-high space hummed with voices in Isla, as well as Gaelic, Friesian and Neo-germanic, an unintelligible mush of languages new and old.

My guardian angel shouted, Out of the way, out of the way. Ambulance personnel coming through.

Men in uniforms shuffled aside leaving some semblance of a path to the door, where an ambulance with flashing lights waited.

Neither Nicha nor my security guards were within sight.

Chapter Two

THE HOSPITAL. Harsh lights and clanging of metal and doors. The smell of antiseptic on the air. I sat shivering, my head reeling, bathed in the smell of my own sweat. It wafted from under my jacket every time I moved. I hated it, felt embarrassed about it. At gamra, being clean, well-dressed and presentable was important. Coldi had an acute sense of smell.

The doctor didn’t seem to mind. He poked about in my palms for buried pieces of glass with a frightfully long pair of tweezers. Even though they had given me an anaesthetic, I could feel some weird sensation of movement bordering on pain. With my adaptation treatment, my body reacted differently to medicines and anaesthetic seemed to be one of those things. Increased metabolism, I guessed, since I was on an acclimatisation course for living in a hot climate.

I told the doctor, but within a few lines of gruffly exchanged conversation, it became clear to me that he knew nothing about adaptation, and was convinced I ran a high fever. To top it off, his first language was Gaelic, and my New Colonist’s version of Isla confused him. In fact, I spoke a dialect referred to by linguists as Cosla, and though the two had started out as the same language, they were now drifting further and further apart. My command of Gaelic didn’t reach beyond asking directions in the street and half-understanding the answer. Worse, even—climatic adaptation was Coldi technology, and I doubted a lot of the terms had Isla translations.

During the long periods of waiting between treatments, I fumbled with my comm unit to get Nicha, or help from a gamra doctor at the Exchange who could explain in medical terms that increased body temperature was the whole point of adaptation, and that a yellowish skin taint came with my skin’s increased resistance to ultra-violet light.

My comm unit wouldn’t work. There was no reception in the emergency room. Then the charge ran out.

I was totally buggered, at the mercy of the system. No, sir, you can’t go. The doctor needs to see you again. For fuck’s sake! If only I had my feeder. What was happening to Nicha?

After the last doctor had looked at my hands, the last nurse had fiddled with my bandage and had given the last bit of advice and told me when to come back for a check-up, an appointment which I told them I couldn’t keep, I was finally allowed to leave. My left hand resembled a mitten and they’d taped together the three middle fingers on my right hand, leaving me two thumbs and a pinky to deal with life. Wonderful.

By now, I was swaying on my feet and as I stood alone in the lift while it rumbled its way to the ground floor, I thought I was going to be sick. I leaned my forehead against the cool metal, swallowing bile. If I spewed here, they’d take me back up and the circus would start again.

A woman behind the reception counter yelled into her headphones. No, now! There’s about a hundred in here. Yes, they’re fucking journalists. Just send someone!

Then someone discovered me in the lift.Mr Wilson!

Hundreds of lenses pointed my way.

Mr Wilson!

I jabbed at a random button with my left thumb, but the first of the news hawks were already at the lift, a man shoving his foot in front of the sensor light that stopped the doors shutting.

The questions flew like rotten eggs.

Mr Wilson, can you tell us what happened?

How is President Sirkonen?

Mr Wilson, can you give us the Union’s position on this attack?

Mr Wilson, are you still going to the Union?

I stopped, blinking at the sea of live cameras.

"Why on Earth would I not be going?"

The crowd hushed. All those reporters sank into an expectant, tense silence, broken only by the sounds of anxious breathing, and occasional beeping equipment.

A woman said, I presume you have heard it’s a Union attack?

Is it . . . My heart did a violent jump.

Shit.

The wavering image, the red aura.

Could it be. . . ? I didn’t know any technology that had those effects, but did that mean it didn’t exist? Shit, shit, double shit. Some of the non-cooperative actions by Nations of Earth guards started to make sense. I was a gamra employee; they didn’t know where my loyalties lay.

I tried to find the asker of the question in the mass. Um—Madam?

A woman wriggled forward, meeting my eyes.

Melissa Hayworth, Flash Newspoint.

About my age, short brown hair and a sharp nose. Fierce brown eyes. Just as fierce as her gutter-press employer.

She asked again, Does this mean you’re withdrawing from your position?

A moment silence. What to say? My stomach was playing up again.

Ms Hayworth, for all I know, having sat in the president’s office and watched the investigators turn over every piece of debris, no one has drawn a conclusion about the perpetrators. I am sure we will hear about this from the police in due course, and before that time, I will refrain from speculating.

I looked straight into the camera attachment on her shoulder. Sophisticated equipment, that. Had I been much younger and not feeling like shit, I might have waved to my father in New Zealand. This was beamed live all over the world.

I’m asking you the question: are you still going?

Of course. For one, I’d be upset at having studied for nothing for eight years.

It was a lame attempt at lightheartedness, but a few people laughed.

Mr Wilson, what do you think will be the outcome of your tenure? asked a different journalist at the front of the crowd. She carried two digi-cameras and an electronic notebook with the stylus dangling on a string. A conservative news service, that one.

"I believe that my candidature is vitally important, especially in times when many factors challenge the relationship between Nations of Earth and the entities of gamra. It is my task to keep this relationship alive and to facilitate dialogue."

The relationship has just been damaged, Melissa Hayworth broke in again. Or should I say: has been damaged further? For all we know, no satisfactory answer has been provided by the Union as to what happened to your predecessor. Someone makes a hypothesis—

I opened my mouth—

Yes, I know it’s only fictional, a harmless movie, but that is not how the Union will be viewing it, is it? They’ll be saying that we accuse them of killing Kershaw. You know they have funny ideas about fiction, and about justice.

She was right of sorts, on both counts. The only gamra species present in any kind of numbers on Earth were the Coldi, and they didn’t get fiction and their justice involved power plays and calculated murder.

That’s why they tried to kill the president! someone yelled at the back of the crowd. A few others supported him.

My heart thudded. Oh damn, oh damn, this wasn’t going to end well.

That is wild speculation. My voice barely rose over the shouts. Instead, I faced the camera attachment on Melissa Hayworth’s shoulder. And may I add, too, that speculation ahead of the facts will only add fuel to the potential disagreement. I strongly advise calm on this subject until a police report becomes available.

I held some hope that the microphone would sift my voice from the racket. At the same time, I knew that denying an outrageous allegation was a lot less sensational than raising it, and that no matter who denied a gamra attack, some rumour would survive until the perpetrator was found, and perhaps even after that time.

And if I knew what was good for me, I would shut up until I had some official information.

If you would please excuse me. I want to go to bed. I stepped out of the lift, looking over the sea of heads and waiting for it to part. But my name clearly wasn’t Moses, and miracles were not going to happen for me.

A male journalist asked, Mr Wilson, just where do you stand?

And another, Yes, you’re defending the Union. For what reason? Is there anything you know that we don’t?

Mr Wilson, is it true that you’re a Union citizen?

Damn. That was one subject I definitely wasn’t going to touch. Not here, not now.

At that moment, thank the heavens, a group of security guards came down the stairs, and a man shouted, Everyone—show us your media passes. Only official Nations of Earth media allowed. Anyone else will be taken to the police.

Some journalists started pushing for the door.

In the mayhem, I slipped behind the reception counter where the receptionist told me Nations of Earth had sent transport.

I sneaked out the hospital’s staff entrance where a white car with a Nations of Earth emblem on the door waited. Gusts of wind whipped my hair into my face, reflecting the anger that simmered inside me.

Is it true you’re a Union citizen?

Who fucking cared? My job was about working the current situation, patching up relationships that had gone from bad to worse in the past twenty years. No us or them.

I opened the car door and climbed in, dumping my reader on the seat next to me.

Mr Wilson, sir, where to?

I gasped.

A car with a driver. Regular vehicles had computers that asked your destination in a really annoying voice, and—in my case—usually asked again, because the voice recognition modules could never make much sense of my dialect.

I gave the man the address of the hotel, wondering where I had gotten the privilege for this personal service, and wondering if it was a good or bad thing.

Large weeping willows lined the road, ghostlike, pretty, and in late October wreathed in yellowing leaves. They were a remnant of the massive tree-planting operations from before the oil wars, a quaint memento of a time I had never known. Oil had become too expensive long before my birth. Even in the very first stories I read in primary school, vehicles ran on electric power and people used public transport.

A news bulletin blared on the radio, but the news was that there was no news, not about Sirkonen, and damn it, not about the perpetrators.

Not much later, I staggered into the hotel’s foyer. The reception counter wavered before my eyes and the young man behind it looked far too awake. I stumbled through the conversation. Yes, my luggage had been brought up. The man gave me some weird looks.

Did I need to order breakfast for tomorrow? For how many people? More weird looks.

Could he scan two of my fingers for doorknob recognition? I held up my bandaged hands.

Oh.

Then he needed to find the manager to open the cupboard that held the old-fashioned access cards.

Finally, I was allowed to go. Looking back through the glass front door, I glimpsed the white car still outside, the driver a dark shadow within. Of course I knew the signs: I was under surveillance. Great.

Up in the carpeted corridor of the tenth floor, I found the reason for the receptionist’s weird looks: my two guards stood in the corridor, one each on either side of the door to my room, like absurd wax statues. Both Indrahui, they were taller than me, broad-shouldered, had skin dark as obsidian with closely-set eyes and tightly curled hair, naturally bronze-coloured, in a bun; but one of the guards had dyed his hair black. The other wore sunglasses.

"Mashara apologises profoundly, Delegate," said the one with the dyed hair.

Apologises? The events were not your fault. Security forces had forced them to wait downstairs when I went to visit Sirkonen.

The man fidgeted. Clearly, they thought the situation was their fault.

"In all honesty, mashara. You did your job as well as you could." I used the forceful-you pronouns. The men were young, simple bodyguards; they were outclassed and outnumbered, never prepared for the turn of events. I hadn’t asked for them, but this morning at some ungodly hour in Athens, less than half an hour after I’d arrived from New Zealand, Amarru had insisted I take them. On the way back, when Sirkonen had signed my handover, I would be an official gamra delegate, and gamra delegates travelled with security, end of story.

"Delegate, mashara apologises." More forcefully.

Embarrassed. Severely so. And I’d do well not to push them. Then I shall accept the apology.

After an awkward silence, the other guard, the one with the sunglasses said, The Delegate became injured?

It’s nothing serious, thank you. I felt bad for these two young men, was itching to ask them how they had made their way here, but one just didn’t, did not, ask one’s security those sorts of questions. One also didn’t ask their names. I was already causing raised eyebrows with my borderline informality. Pronouns, Delegate, pronouns. Hundreds of ways to say you, and only the most formal would be appropriate.

"Have mashara heard anything regarding my zhayma?"

The man with the dyed black hair inclined his head, still not meeting my eyes. "Mashara regrets not." More embarrassment.

"The Delegate would appreciate if mashara would keep trying."

He bowed. Certainly, Delegate.

I slid the access key through the slot next to the door and let myself into the room. Lights flickered on.

I let out a tension-filled breath. This half-baked delegate had certainly not handled his bodyguards too well.

The room’s control panel, triggered by my body heat, asked me, in a disembodied male voice, if I wanted to watch a show or a movie. I told it I wanted the power connected to the recharge sockets, and had to repeat that three times before the infernal piece of technology understood me.

Cosla, the New Colonist’s dialect fast on its way to becoming a language in its own right. Where Isla, International Standard Language, was an amalgamate of what used to be English, Chinese, Spanish and new words related to technology, Cosla had adopted a good number of Coldi words and the Damarcian tendency to speak of oneself in third person in formal conversation. I had spoken it since I was ten and went with my father and Damarcian stepmother to Midway Space Station. I had perfected it as a teenager at Taurus Grammar, and tried to escape it, in vain, during my years as a student at Pavola, on Mars. I wasn’t a child of this Earth, had never been. That’s why I was suited to this position, and I was determined that people would come to appreciate it.

I plugged in my comm unit and rang the security post at the Nations of Earth complex. It was busy, not once, but all five times I tried. While I redialled and listened to the busy recording, please log your message at the following ID, I wriggled my bag open and extracted the infusor band, managed to loop it around my arm, tighten the strap with my teeth, and find the box of canisters.

I tipped them on the bed and slotted one into the receptacle. Click. A faint hissing sound. White powder whirled behind the glass as the infusor shot nanoscale dust into my arm. It tickled and a patch of cold spread out over my skin. I knew the treatment didn’t work that fast, but I already felt a lot better.

Then I rang the hotel’s reception. Could I please have something to eat; I didn’t care what.

They could order a take-away, they said, and I told them yes, please. Then I tried to connect to security again while I waited for the food to turn up. My stomach rumbled.

This time, the call was answered by a man whose gravelly voice sounded like he had one hell of a hangover.

I cringed, but pushed ahead with my question. I believe you took a man in custody at the president’s office tonight.

Sorry, Mister, I can’t comment about that.

But I’ve been—

Look, I’ve had about a hundred calls from the press—

I’m not from the press—

That’s what they all say.

But I’m Cory Wilson, his employer! I almost screamed. I was losing it. Definitely not coping very well. Tired, sore. Out of patience. Out of ideas.

Mr Wilson? Cory Wilson who was in the office with the president?

Yes.

Can I have your ID please?

Pain spiking through my bandaged palms, I dug out my Nations of Earth identity chip, and patched him the number, flooding with relief, until he said, He’s at the police station.

So I called the police station. Same story. We don’t talk to the press. Hundreds of people have already called today. Please get off the line in case of a real emergency.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to scream this time to get myself believed. I didn’t think I could have. All I could see was Nicha pacing around a concrete cell. Coldi hated being alone; their need to be with their associates was pathological. If he could only hear my voice . . .

But the senior officer who came on the line said, No, you can’t talk to anyone who’s in custody.

"Nicha Palayi is a gamra citizen. He has the right to speak to the nearest gamra representative, which is me. And I don’t even know why he’s in custody." And damn it, my voice wasn’t holding up.

A reason which shall be heard in court.

Court? On what basis? What proof? My heart was thudding. Was there proof?

I’m not authorised to discuss that, sir.

He has the right to one call. Clutching at straws now.

He’s already used it.

That hurt. Nicha hadn’t called me. It also made sense. He would have called the Exchange. Maybe Nicha had tried to call me first when I was still at the hospital, where there was no reception. Shit. Besides, the Exchange would have been a better choice; that’s what I would have done. At the Exchange, in Athens, they had staff to help gamra citizens out of legal trouble.

It still hurt. I’d like to give him a message. Can you pass it on for me?

No, I’m sorry.

"Look, he’s Coldi. He needs to hear a familiar voice or he’ll start attacking the walls, or your personnel. I have to talk to him."

You can’t, I’m sorry.

But we’re leaving the day after tomorrow! Frustration spiked.

That was no excuse and predictably got me nowhere. For as long as the police needed him, Nicha wouldn’t be going anywhere, least of all out of the country, never mind off-Earth. After a minute or so more arguing, I gave up. I would have to contact someone higher in the department tomorrow.

Oh, if only I hadn’t handed in my feeder.

While I had been talking, a black Indrahui shadow had snuck into my room to put a box on the table, where it sat exuding tantalising smells.

My stomach grumbling, I ripped the cardboard lid, but the contents didn’t look half as nice as they smelled. The chickpea pita had gone soft with tomato sauce and fell apart when I poked it with the fork. Bloody hell. I’d paid—how much—for this? I swore that every time I left the Exchange life outside became more expensive.

Still, I was hungry and I ate it, half-cold. Couldn’t stop thinking of how Nicha loved chickpea pita—not this bland stuff: he made his own in the unit we shared at the Exchange complex in Athens, which was like a gamra enclave on Earth. We would eat it on the balcony, looking at the city stretch out towards the hazy horizon, discussing some theoretical issue. Dip-length of Exchange anpar threads as a relationship to the distance from the galactic centre, things like that.

I wiped my eyes with the back of my bandaged hands. Damn Nicha.

I picked up my unit again and pressed the one-button shortkey for my office at the Exchange. The beeper rang, and rang, and changed tone several times before the call was answered by a young man at general reception who sounded like he hadn’t even heard the news about Sirkonen. Some of the people over there got so damned insular, like they were an island of civilisation on a barbarian world, populated with Neanderthals unable to hold a conversation—the Neanderthals being us.

Deep breath, Mr Wilson.

Anyway, the young man knew nothing. Leave a message and call back tomorrow.

I leaned my head in my hands, remembered too late that they hurt.

What was I going to do? Was there anyone else I could try?

Gamra people on Earth had a database: an extensive directory of local extraterrestrial contacts, people who would always help you if you were a gamra citizen, which I was, yes nosy journalists, having passed the exam three years ago.

I froze, staring at the opposite wall, horrified that the option had crossed my mind.

That gamra help me—against my own people, whom I was to represent?

Gamra loyalties, and Coldi ones, too, spread out like an interconnected web. There was no either/or. A person was the sum of his or her ties, often to wildly different and sometimes opposing camps. Always in pairs, always spreading outwards, reaching like little spider veins without regards for societal boundaries. Once there was a boundary, a break in the network, society fractured. Nations of Earth would never understand. Once I used gamra intelligence against them, I might as well resign.

One last option: the unofficial mantra amongst the bureaucrats of Nations of Earth was: if in trouble, send it to your boss. I didn’t like the attitude, but I was running out of ideas.

I selected another ID, which rang four times before it was answered with a muffled, Hmph . . . whozzat? A female voice.

Delia, it’s Cory here.

Cory . . . The sound of rustling. What the fuck is the time?

I glanced at the clock. It was 1:35 am. Oh—I’m sorry, I was at the hospital . . .

Fuck, Cory. More rustling. Of sheets, I was sure by now. How is Sirkonen?

I don’t know. No one’s saying. How could she sleep while all this was going on?

A sigh. Fuck, Cory. Where are you?

I’m at the hotel now, but I have a problem. Nicha hasn’t come back here. The police say he’s been held overnight and they won’t give me any information on why. I need to talk to him and I was wondering if you—

"I? Cory, I’m a Nations of Earth employee. He’s Union. How am I supposed to do anything?"

Because within Nations of Earth, you have far more authority than I.

"Not to inquire about a Union citizen. I have no authority to do that. Cory, if the police say they have a reason to hold him overnight, then that’s what they will do. There is nothing, nothing, I can do about that."

But you know about the Coldi need to be with someone. He’ll go crazy alone.

Let his Union look after that.

I’m trying, but I’m not getting through!

A small, awful silence. At this time of the day? No, of course not. Go to bed.

Thousands of swear words whirled through my mind, not all of them in Isla. But there was mahzu—a Coldi word meaning calm or pride. A person must maintain it, because to do otherwise would be embarrassing as well as counterproductive. So as calmly as I could, I said, Good night.

Good night, Cory. Oh, did the ice in her voice chill me.

I dropped my comm unit on the table and sat there, panting, hearing my own voice, I’m trying, but I’m not getting through. And then the little silence as Delia processed that sentence, and found it meaning, I’m in discussion with gamra. I am gamra before I’m Nations of Earth. And that was exactly the accusation oft levelled at me.

Oh damn, that was not smart.

Delia was right; there was nothing I could do, not to get to Nicha, nor to undo that horrible slip of the tongue.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

I went into the bathroom and turned on the tap in the bath. I sat under the gurgling stream, taking care not to wet my bandaged hands, until I’d used up the room’s daily hot water allowance. Steam rose from the surface of the water, warm and comfortable, but if I had hoped it would make me sleepy, I had been mistaken.

Thoughts whirled in my head. Nicha’s face as I went into the president’s office, his gold-flecked dark eyes, almost without whites, his hair tied traditionally in a ponytail. Sirkonen’s nervous talk, his sudden turn to the window and then—bang. Space-proof glass. That must have taken some explosion.

I knew there were hand-held, Coldi-produced weapons which could shatter walls, so I didn’t think they’d have trouble with glass, no matter how space-proof.

But why suspect Nicha? Just because he happened to be the only gamra person close to the president’s office? Nicha could never have done anything. He’d been waiting in the foyer. Even Sirkonen could confirm that. The secretary had been there. He could confirm it, too. They had to be fucking kidding. Thoughts chased each other through my mind.

I heaved myself out of the bath, found something vile and strong in the minibar and downed it in a couple of gulps.

Talk about Sirkonen . . . I made a grab for my jacket, dug the datastick from the pocket—ouch—and slid it into the reader.

The first page was empty, as if title and author had been removed. I scrolled down. Text and diagrams flashed over the screen. There were maps, many of them, with coloured areas, and large blocks of text with longs words like subequatorial jet stream, closed cell systems. Pretty dry scientific stuff. This might be something of interest, but to me, it hardly looked dramatic.

I took the datastick out and slid it back in my pocket. I’d made the right decision not to make a fuss over it.

Then I settled in bed with my reader, flicking aimlessly through the world’s news services. No news about Sirkonen other than what I already knew. A terse statement prepared by Sirkonen’s chief of staff, peppered with words like grave concern for his health.

The weather. A low-pressure area moving over western Europe. Wind and rain expected. Nothing new there, either.

South Africa had cemented its unbeaten position in cricket.

Something about a scientist who had disappeared. I had no doubt the story would have made the headlines had it not been for the attack on Sirkonen.

I fiddled a bit with the puzzles, trying to solve the crossword; but by that time the effect of the drink kicked in, and I started to feel sleepy.

It took three attempts to get the room control to turn off the light, but finally I crawled into bed.

My head spun.

My palms throbbed.

It was too hot in the room.

Acid burned in my stomach.

I was not tired.

All the while I lay on the bed staring at strips of light moving over the ceiling as trams passed on the road outside, instead seeing the sails track lazily across the Bay of Islands, visible from my father’s spare bedroom window. Midday sun, wind in my hair. Nicha’s laughter.

Damn jet lag.

Oh, damn. I had completely forgotten to ring Eva. What sort of fiancé was I?

Chapter Three

SOMEONE BANGED on the door, hard.

I raised myself on my elbows, the sound still reverberating in the woolly space between my ears and my brain. Darkness.

Green letters on the bedside clock glared 6:59. Last time I had seen those numbers they said 5:31.

Bloody hell. Nich’?

The eerie silence echoed inside me. No chatter, no garbled curses from Nicha’s thoughts. The room control must have noticed me move, because the annoying male voice asked me if I wanted lights on. I swore at the man-in-the-box, and to my great surprise he turned on the bedside light.

The banging had moved further down the hall, a muffled sound, accompanied by a male voice.

I scrambled out of bed, and as I told the room control to open the door, I realised what the man had shouted: breakfast. Two lots of breakfast in fact, on a tray on the floor. One for me, one for Nicha. That really brought it home to me. Nicha, alone in a police cell, pacing around, clawing at the walls.

One of the men jumped into action and picked up the tray, handing it to me with an intense look of those closely-set moss-green eyes. Did he see how much I was falling apart?

"Any news, mashara?"

No news, Delegate. Was that a cringe?

I balanced the tray on my arm, carried it inside and manoeuvred it onto the table, awkward as hell. When I flicked the lid off one of the plates, the smell of fried eggs billowed from underneath. No bacon. The hotel didn’t offer oysters for breakfast and I hadn’t wanted to bother Nicha with the smell of the meat of a vertebrate animal, which Coldi people didn’t eat. Nicha’s presence was everywhere.

I glanced at the clock. It was too early to start ringing.

I pushed a chair back with my foot, sat down and dragged my reader by the charging cord, finding the site of the World Newspoint service with only the touch of one thumb. A single headline across the top of the page screamed Attack in huge letters. There was a live shot of the ruined window of Sirkonen’s office and another of an ambulance driving off said to have contained the president. Nothing on how Sirkonen was. At least that meant he was still alive. Let’s stay positive; although I felt that if there were any positive news, they would have published it, too.

My comm unit beeped.

I jumped up and retrieved it from the table next to the door, where it had been recharging. I pressed answer while fumbling with the earpiece and was blasted by a high-pitched squeak.

Ouch. A relay.

I ran across the room again, flung the unit next to my reader and, with my unbandaged left thumb, activated the wireless communication interface.

Someone from outside, off-planet—relayed through the Exchange.

The screen went white and at the top appeared the Coldi text, Sender 876735475-02 1.24 Beratha.

By then, I knew. Beratha was the second-largest city of Asto, the Coldi homeworld. It hosted a massive armed forces base. I knew only one person in Beratha: Nicha’s father.

While the bacteria in the crystalline screen worked to display the next lines of text, I scrambled under my discarded and bloodied shirt for the Coldi keyboard module, since I needed my feeder to get the thought sensor working in Coldi, and since I didn’t have my damn feeder . . . I found the keyboard projector and plugged it in while unfolding the stand from the bottom of the pen-sized device so it stood straight up, it’s eye pointing at the table. A small light on the cylinder activated and the one hundred and twelve characters of the common Coldi alphabet appeared projected onto the table, just as the message on the screen completed.

I hear my son is in trouble. Like a typical Coldi, Nicha’s father never wasted much time in greetings.

I replied using a fork, because my bandaged and taped-together fingers didn’t allow the level of control I needed to touch the keys projected onto the table.

Trouble would be an overstatement.

I winced and cursed with every character. Was I ever glad Coldi had one character per syllable.

Send. Wait until the dot had stopped blinking.

I should have brought my tea. A person grew impatient waiting for communication to go through, even if that communication was beamed across the continent, up into space, through the Exchange network of anpar lines and halfway across the surface of another planet. Tea would be a great thing to have. I eyed the cup on the table, steaming in the glow from the bedside light. My eggs were getting cold, too.

But the reply came back quickly. There is talk that blames Asto for this attack.

I typed, Allegations only, but knew the damage had been done. Damn that movie.

It is because of these allegations that my son has been taken into custody?

I typed, He is innocent and according to local law should be released soon.

Keeping all fingers and toes crossed of course, never mind that I couldn’t manage that at the moment—whose stupid idea had it been to tape my fingers together?

The reply shot back, How soon?

Even though Nicha was gamra employed, I knew in one way or another he still worked for Asto. There was a word, imayu, that described the interpersonal networks. Within Asto society, the ties a person acquired during life were never severed, and their influence reached far. You and a partner, which could be a sibling, a friend or a business contact, reported to a superior, who was then paired with another who reported to their superior, and so on and so forth, all the way up. Nicha’s father ranked frightfully high in Asto’s air force. Through his father, Nicha’s loyalty would be tied up to Ezhya Palayi himself. That was someone you definitely did not want to cross.

I typed, I am investigating his release.

Not mentioning that by Asto standards, I was relatively powerless to do so, but I did not want Asto involved in this. To them, democracy was an undesirable brand of activism. They had curious methods of justice. Writs served to perpetrators, who then had to respond within certain time or risk a retribution squad, often leading to assassination. Order and honouring imayu was more important than the life of an individual. They had plenty of individuals on Asto.

The answer blinked back, When will he be released?

Not, as I noted, outrage over the fact that Nicha had been detained. Guess it was part of what a military officer would call hazards of the job, but I didn’t like it.

I typed, Soon, I hope.

Not wanting to say this afternoon. Legally, the police couldn’t hold Nicha for more than twenty-four hours in absence of a formal charge. Then again, who knew if that would apply to stateless gamra citizens. Nicha had lost his European passport in the extraterrestrial citizenship case; he had been too disgusted to reapply and sit for the test the government said he needed to pass to be accepted in the country where he spent most of his adult life. And paid his taxes.

The reply shot back again, Do you require help?

I replied, equally fast, Not yet.

Indicating that help might well be called for in the future, the polite thing to do. But no, seeing help in Coldi terms would most likely involve soldiers with guns, I emphatically did not want help.

I typed, The Exchange is looking into it.

Or so I hoped.

Tell them I’m not impressed they’ve allowed this to happen.

I will convey that. I’m not impressed either. There were no untruths in that.

Thank you. I will leave it in your capable hands.

Like a true military person, he signed off without further comment. I hoped this meant disaster was temporarily averted. But, oh, someone needed to act quickly.

I dragged my comm unit over the table. The shortkey button connected to my office at the Exchange, but the junior administration assistant who answered said that the staff were in a meeting with Amarru. I could get her through the feeder network. I’m not repeating what I said then. If I caught the idiot who had made me hand in my feeder . . . The young man fell silent, possibly startled by my command of Coldi swear words—there were advantages to living with the son of a military officer. Then he said he’d leave messages.

I disconnected, stumbled to the other side of the table and started on my eggs. The toast had gone soggy. I shoved it aside and drank my tea, blowing steam off the surface.

In the street below, driverless buses splashed over their designated lanes in rain-slicked streets. A faint glow of light blue tinted the sky.

Two hours before start of business. I didn’t know if I had that much patience.

Meanwhile, I’d better look at the news. I logged onto my mail program. There were over three thousand messages, which I sorted alphabetically and scanned for familiar senders. Delia Murchison—the report you asked for. Delia again—addendum.

The history of Coldi involvement on Earth since 1961, the oldest record of Coldi presence in Athens, all secret of course, since the Coldi had only officially acknowledged their presence in 2094. Some gamra member entities had asked me to prepare this material, because they found it hard to accept that a world with such a large population had been isolated from gamra for so long and wanted to know how this had come about. There was an undertone of accusing the Coldi for keeping gamra away from Earth, but in light of what had happened, I wondered why I had ever thought this bickering within gamra important.

I shifted those messages in my work area and wondered if this meant Delia was no longer angry with me. That midnight call had been none too bright. Desperate. I realised I didn’t function well without my zhayma either, at least not on an emotional level.

There were no official messages from Nations of Earth.

That was strange, because I would have expected some sort of statement from